Monday 18 February 2008 10.40 EST
First published on Monday 18 February 2008 10.40 EST

The Department of Health has been accused of wasting taxpayers' money over its failure to have a clear policy to encourage its staff to drink tap water.

A new report published today by the food and farming charity Sustain says the department is wasting almost £200,000 every year on bottled water. This could have paid for 14 baby incubators, 34 hip replacements or 244 cataract operations, it claims.

The report, The Taps Are Turning, confirms the environmental damage caused by the bottled water industry, as well as highlighting the waste of money.

The report looks at how government and business have responded to the challenges in Sustain's report, Have You Bottled It?, published last year. It finds that most government departments and businesses are changing to tap water, but usually while they continue to buy bottled water.

Sustain's coordinator, Jeanette Longfield, said: "It is crazy that theDepartment of Health is pouring away money buying unnecessary bottledwater, which is not only a rip-off but also damages our environment."

At the time of Sustain's survey of almost 40 government departments andagencies, only the Department of Health had no policy to shift to tap water.

Longfield continued: "Organisations like the Department of Healthare dinosaurs. We have found that world cities - such as San Francisco,Paris, New York and London - are turning on to tap water".

The mayor of San Francisco, Gavin Newsom, banned bottled water from all city departments in summer 2007. London's mayor, Ken Livingstone, confirmed that he has "instructed my staff to ensure that bottled water is not provided at any internal meeting in City Hall for which I have responsibility".

The report comes on the eve of a major campaign from utility company Thames Water to encourage London restaurants and cafés to provide free tap water to their customers in specially designed carafes.

In a Panorama programme tonight, the environment minister, Phil Woolas, condemns the bottled water industry as "daft" and says it borders on being "morally unacceptable".

Woolas's comments have provoked an angry response from the industry, which is worth approximately £1.7bn annually and accounts for 15% of soft drinks sales in the UK.

Britons consume 3bn litres of bottled water a year. The environmental impact begins with packaging. Most bottled water is siphoned into PET (polyethylene terephthalate) bottles; of 13bn plastic bottles sold in the UK last year, just 3bn were recycled. Most is thrown into landfill or, increasingly, incinerated. The rest becomes environmental pollution, particularly in the ocean where, as the plastic slowly fragments, it poses a serious threat to wildlife.

With a low rate of recycling, making bottles requires virgin materials, namely petroleum feedstocks. It takes 162g of oil and seven litres of water (including power plant cooling water) to manufacture a single one-litre bottle, creating over 100g of greenhouse gas emissions (10 balloons full of CO2) per empty bottle.

To make the 29bn plastic bottles used annually in the US, the world's biggest consumer of bottled water, requires more than 17m barrels of oil a year, enough to fuel more than a million cars for a year.